Fundamentalism and Liberal Protestantism

FUNDAMENTALISM AND LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM

Toward Liberalism

Since the Civil War the mainline Protestant denominations proved surprisingly capable of adapting intellectual challenges such as Darwinian evolution, biblical research, artistic modernism, and philosophical naturalism into their theologies and practices. There was a general trend toward liberalism, which meant that mainline Protestantism attempted to remain broadly and optimistically humanistic and began treating the Bible less as a book of literal truth than as a book of symbolic and metaphoric wisdom. Not all Protestants followed the trend, however. One important group of Protestants rejected almost all of the philosophical innovations of the modern era and attempted a return to the "fundamentals" of Protestantism. At the Niagara Bible Conference of 1895 fundamentalists set forth five essential articles of faith: the inerrancy of Scripture, the divinity and virgin birth of Christ, the idea of "substitutionary atonement" (Christ taking the place of sinners on the cross), the physical Resurrection, and the bodily return of Christ to earth. These fundamentals, amended and supplemented, were widely publicized in a series of tracts published between 1910 and 1915 called The Fundamentals. They became the basis of modern fundamentalism.

Controversy

Before the 1940s fundamentalists often clashed with liberals, especially at Protestant seminaries and other sites of religious instruction. Well-known liberals such as Harry Emerson Fosdick often clashed in Protestant periodicals with fundamentalists such as J. Gresham Machen. In the 1920s differences of opinion regarding the literal truth of the Bible became heated, culminating in the famous Scopes trial of 1925 and the denunciations of liberalism by flamboyant evangelist Billy Sunday. The Scopes trial and Sunday did fundamentalism more harm than good. By the end of World War II fundamentalists were generally in retreat, their theology associated by the public with ignorance and intolerance. American Protestantism seemed to have moved definitively into the liberal camp.

Realignment

The victory of liberal Protestantism was less than complete, however. Increasingly suburban and socially oriented, liberal Protestantism tended to lack both intellectual rigor and spiritual fulfillment. Liberal ministers struggled to come to grips with the blow that Nazism and the Holocaust gave to their optimistic assessments of human nature. Liberal Protestantism seemed to drift theologically and spiritually, although the intervention of neo-orthodox theology revitalized the theological premises of liberal Protestantism. At the same time, fundamentalists were mobilizing. Harold J. Ockenga, pastor of the historic Park Street Church in Boston, believed he could recruit new congregants from among the ranks of demoralized adherents of liberal Protestantism. He helped found the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942. The next year fundamentalists organized Youth for Christ, an agency of teen recruitment. A broad coalition of Protestant conservatives, the NAE attempted to foster interfundamentalist unity. By 1947 it had grown to include thirty denominations and more than 1.3 million members. Ockenga was a leading spokesman for "the new evangelicals," a phrase he coined in 1947. Another champion of this movement was Carl F. H. Henry, who in 1956 would found and edit Christianity Today. By 1967 this evangelical journal had 150,000 paid subscribers. In 1947 Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, in which he issued a call for American conservatives to combine social responsibility and biblical fidelity. The year 1947 saw the founding of the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, one of the most respected evangelical schools and a center for scholarly fundamentalism. During the closing years of the 1940s there was a renewal of evangelical scholarship, led by the publication of E. J. Carnell's Introduction to Christian Apologetics (1948). This work established Carnell as the new intellectual spokesman for conservatism, and he became president of Fuller. In 1949 the Evangelical Theological Society was formed as a professional organization committed to the inerrancy of Scripture and the promotion of evangelical scholarship. That year also brought a dynamic evangelist, Billy Graham, to public attention. Graham conducted a highly publicized revival and crusade in the fall that attracted thousands of participants. With church attendance rising for both liberals and fundamentalists, theological controversies between the two groups would soon resume.

Sources:

Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America: A Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life (New York; Scribners, 1981);

William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).